Bleeding Love
by kalanthia
Summary: Lily is dead. Severus tries to cope with his pain and goes down a very dark road.


Disclaimer: Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling.

Category: Angst/Hurt

A/N: This is somehow the aftermath of the first part of the Snape chapter that I published in "The Second Boy Who Lived". I'm still working on the continuation of the Snape story line that will be in one of the later chapters, and somehow I went down the wrong path when I was half-asleep and wondering what-if… A much darker and more desperate Snape who hasn't anything in common with the Snape from 2BWL.

Warning: This story is about cutting and suicidal behaviour. If you are younger than 18, please do not continue!

**Bleeding Love**

Death had never been an option. For others death might offer an escape, but never for him. If there was an afterlife, Lily would still be with James. He wouldn't be able to change that even if he outlived eternity.

So he continued to live. The cancer that was love ate his heart, tore it apart with sharp little teeth. The hole in his heart grew and grew until it threatened to swallow him up. He saw himself standing at the edge of the bottomless pit, ready to fall, but the fall never came. He merely stood on the abyss and became numb. He was no longer able to feel a thing.

He didn't even freeze down in the dungeon where he chose to live though Dumbledore tried to convince him to take another flat in the vast castle. He refused.

What good were windows when he had nothing left to look forward to? When the sun was no longer able to warm him?

He started to teach like he had promised Dumbledore, but he found no pleasure in it. He knew that he was good and that the students in his classes achieved good grades after they accepted that he didn't tolerate sloth and slopiness. But he took no pride from that.

Two years passed and nothing changed. He was as numb as ever.

He was required to attend the staff's Christmas celebration. He had never savoured alcohol, and became drunk easily when the other teachers poured him glass after glass. He let Professor Sinistra, a young woman who had joined the staff only this year, take his hand and lead him from the room. He slept with her wondering the whole time she was moving up and down on him how he was still able to perform considering the amount of alcohol he had had. When she rolled off of him and fell asleep, he got up, dressed and crept back to his room. The next morning he welcomed the head-splitting headache as his punishment. He and Sinistra never spoke about it.

He stopped paying attention to his looks. It didn't matter that the fumes of the potions ruined his hair and made it constantly greasy. No one looked at him anyway.

A few years later, while preparing for class, he cut off the tip of his left index finger by accident. He sat there, admiring the red liquid that oozed out of him and the white bone he could see. He was fascinated by the pain he all of a sudden felt after the first shock subsided. He could feel _something_ after all.

He sat there for about an hour, watching the blood trickle on the table, pooling around the potion ingredients on the cutting board, lazily flowing over the blade of the knife that still lay where he had dropped it. Finally he made himself grab a tea towel and wrapped it around his finger. He used a cleaning spell to make the blood vanish from the table. Then he got up, picked up the cut-off finger joint and walked to the infirmary to let Madame Pomfrey fuss over him.

He pretended to listen to her scolding while he thought about how he could re-create the accident without drawing suspicion from others. He needed to be more subtle than cutting of a finger. Something that he could heal on his own.

A whole week long he used the evenings brewing Healing Solutions and tinctures that he could use to repair cuts. From now on he spent the Saturday evenings on the floor of his study, sitting up against a wall, the knife that had drawn the first blood in his right hand. He experimented and studied how he had to press the blade against his skin to injure it. How deep he could cut. How deep he needed to cut so he would feel pain. Which angle provoced the sharpest pain.

He did it for the pain, he knew that. He knew that this was dangerous behaviour, behaviour that he as a teacher would have to report to the Headmaster if he found a student was doing it.

But he also knew that he was more careful than the students would ever be. He always made sure that his door was locked and that the Mufflatio Spell prevented people on the other side of the door from hearing what was going in inside. He counted the hours and minutes between Saturdays.

He soon discovered that, while cutting down to the artery in his wrist drew an enormous amount of blood and made him feel weaker with each passing minute, it wasn't the most painful thing to do. He didn't do this to die, he did it to _feel_.

There was no heart in his chest that could feel, but the pain in his arm was real.

He added to the pain with cutting his upper legs and thighs. He watched the blood trickle and smelled the metallic scent of it linger in the air. He watched himself feel.

Evanesco and Episkey became his friends when he cleaned up his sessions.

Soon the pain wasn't big enough.

He tried to cut the Dark Mark out of his skin. He found out that the Dark Magic that had been used to scar him prevented this. When it wouldn't come off, he tried to claw it out with his fingernails until he lay sobbing on the floor, his blood-smeared fingers clutching his arm. Now he felt something new: hatred and disgust for the weak creature he had become.

He used the Sectumsempra Curse on his left arm.

The blinding pain was exquisite, and left him breathless and gasping.

The curse cracked his skin open like the whack of an invisible cat o' nine tails.

The first time he used it, he was almost unable to crawl to his desk to reach the antidote. The next time he was more careful and kept the tiny bottle at arm's length on the floor next to him.

The pain brought him close to oblivion.

The pain cleansed him and made him almost forget his sins.

The pain became his drug of choice.

He then used the Sectumsempra on other body parts. He stripped to his underwear and applied the curse to his legs, his stomach, his chest. He lay on the floor, his head propped up against the wall, and admired the cracked skin, the sinews and the adipose tissue that surfaced under it before blood spilled over them.

He went on like this for years, week after week bleeding his pain and pained by his bleeding, until one day he found himself thinking that now he would even welcome death.

He just had to stay here on the floor, his warm blood wrapping his body like a blanket, and wait for death to come. If heaven and hell existed like the Muggles believed, there was no danger that he would see Lily again. _She must be an angel, and I will be in purgatory_.

He was tempted to never move again and just let his life flow out of his body until he was swept away by Death.

In the end, his trembling fingers reached for the tiny flask, uncorked it and pressed it against his cracked lips. His pain was replaced by the hurting of the healing process.

The next morning, he got up from the floor, showered and dressed, and joined his collegues for breakfast in the Great Hall as if nothing had happened.

He forced himself to sip black tea and to swallow bites of jam sandwiches while the others talked animatedly about the new first-year students who would arrive this evening. Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, would be among them.

A new kind of hell lay waiting for him: the boy who had his mother's eyes.


End file.
